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The Artist’s Reality by Mark Rothko

Unlike Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art or Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content, Mark Rothko’s own writing The Artist’s Reality wasn’t published during his lifetime. The book had remained merely a rumor among his friends and family until it was discovered by accident. Christopher Rothko has done a great service to the art world by collecting the material and making it available to the public. Rothko has insights into art, philosophy, and culture that I have found nowhere else. He captures the struggle of his era where artists were attempting to create a universal visual language that moved beyond symbolic representation. Even though the material was written before his color field paintings, the book gave me deep new insight into the thought process behind them. I spent months mulling over the material in this book and have read it twice. Many readers will likely find the writing obtuse and some of the thoughts hastily constructed. If you don’t know Mark Rothko’s work, I suggest familiarizing yourself with his paintings first so that you can see thinking that gave birth to his work.

January 2, 2018 By Joshua Wait
Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: art

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Blue Rivers serves up original artwork, photos, and poetry as well as topical essays about art, culture, and the environment.

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